Bastøy — Prison as a Practice of Normal Life

We came from Russia, where the prison system is built around isolation, hierarchy, torture, and the deprivation of ordinary life. We wanted to encounter a fundamentally different model of incarceration — not a “better prison” in a cosmetic sense, but a place where the very idea of punishment is understood differently. We had the opportunity to visit the island and record an interview with Bastøy’s director, Arne Kvernvik Nilsen.

Bastøy is an open prison located on an island in the Oslofjord. It houses men who have already served part of their sentences and are approaching the end of longer prison terms. What makes Bastøy particularly interesting is that it operates within a broader Norwegian correctional philosophy known as the “principle of normality.”

The principle is strikingly simple: the punishment is the restriction of liberty. A prison sentence does not, in itself, strip a person of all their other rights.

Therefore, as far as security allows, life inside prison should resemble life outside it. Instead of making a person increasingly dependent on an institution, the system attempts to preserve — and sometimes develop — their capacity to live independently. Everyday life itself becomes part of rehabilitation.

Here, there is an actual home in which you are expected to live much as you would after release: cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, keeping things in order, planning your day, and taking responsibility for the space you live in. Working. Going shopping. Looking after a home. Interacting with other people in an environment where not every movement is organised through coercion.

For someone who has spent years inside an institution — or who may never have experienced stable housing before incarceration — simply knowing how to live in a home can itself be a skill that has to be learned. Prison can teach a person how to survive prison extremely well while simultaneously making them less capable of surviving outside it.

Bastøy attempts to reverse this logic.

On the island, there is work involving agriculture and animals, as well as access to education, library services, and other elements of ordinary social infrastructure. Even the library is integrated into Norway’s public library system rather than functioning solely as an isolated prison service.

At Bastøy, rehabilitation is therefore not simply a programme imposed on a person from the outside. It is embedded in the most ordinary practices: preparing food, caring for a space, working, learning, making decisions, building relationships with other people, and taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s choices.

Even food opens up another, more speculative dimension of this question. Fish and omega-3 fatty acids have been studied in relation to aggressive behaviour, including among incarcerated populations. Recent research suggests that omega-3 supplementation may lead to a modest reduction in aggression. This does not, of course, mean that salmon is a “treatment for aggression.” But nevertheless, on the island, the “prisoners” catch fish and grill it together over an open fire.

Perhaps the most radical element of Bastøy is, in fact, something very modest. It tries not to manufacture a separate category of human being called “the prisoner.”

And perhaps the most important question Bastøy poses is not whether prisons can become more comfortable.

It is what a prison should teach a person:

how to be a prisoner —

or how to stop being one.